During the opening keynote with SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott, there was an amazing customer panel that sportscaster James Brown moderated, which highlighted the SAP journeys of Under Armour, the National Basketball Association, and the San Francisco 49ers. Each executive shared how the business is using SAP HANA to deliver better and smarter apparel, faster analytics for sports stats, and a richer fan experience, respectively. This panel got some flack from attendees for being too “sports-oriented”. However, the insights provided could easily be applied to any industry.

I attended another customer panel on Day 1 focused on SAP HANA that included four executives from the companies John Deere, Bayer MaterialScience, Mercedes AMG, and Eby-Brown. Each story was unique but again had a similar theme of “faster, stronger, better.” insiderPROFILES magazine recently highlighted Eby-Brown’s story on the cover of the Apr-May-Jun 2013 edition: insiderprofiles.wispubs.com/article.aspx.... Keep an eye out for future articles highlighting the other companies that participated in this panel.

Day 2 opened with a keynote presented by the other SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe. Lars Dalgaard was supposed to take the stage as well, but due to a death in the family, he was unable to attend the event this year. Instead, attendees got to watch a video with SuccessFactors customers Pepsico, Nespresso, and Timken sharing their stories of moving to the cloud. Later in the day, I was lucky enough to catch two more customer panel sessions focused on SAP HANA.

One of these panels highlighted companies that were running SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA. Executives from Medtronic, Synopsis, Adidas Group, and Marathon Oil participated. While the stories were all different – re-implementations, data migrations, and new roll outs – each had the common theme of amazing results. I had a chance to catch up with Medtronic’s Senior Director of IT, Steve Teichman before he took the stage. I worked with Steve years ago when insiderPROFILES published its very first customer profile of an early adopter of SAP HANA. Read about Medtronic’s experiences here: insiderprofiles.wispubs.com/article.aspx.... And don’t be surprised to see a follow-up story in an upcoming edition of the magazine.

The second HANA customer panel I caught that day highlighted VPs of Spirit Aerosystems and Unilever who provided advice for customers considering embarking on SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA journeys. Marc Bechet of Unilever says that the newly gained speed has allowed the company to finish its financial close days faster. And James Cocca of Spirit claims that reporting is now 7,000 times faster. insiderPROFILES will be highlighting Unilever’s story in its Jul-Aug-Sep 2013 edition so be sure to check back.

But quite possibly, out of the 20 or so customer-led sessions I attended, one of my favorites and most popular was Lockheed Martins’ HANA story. This session was presented in one of the microforum areas, which was clearly not big enough for the number of attendees who showed up. There were five or six rows of people crowded around the forum struggling to hear the story. Fortunately, I happened to find myself standing right next to Chris Church of Lockheed Martin (missiles) who I worked with years ago when the magazine published his insights regarding Lockheed’s SAP ERP upgrade: insiderprofiles.wispubs.com/article.aspx.... Chris gave me a first-hand account of some of the great things Lockheed is doing. So expect to see an update on Lockheed’s journey to adopt SAP HANA in an upcoming edition of the magazine.

After attending the HR 2013 keynote on Tuesday, I have to say, I felt good about the vibe for this week’s event. If yesterday morning’s crowd was any indication, it’s going to be a fun-filled conference – there were lots of smiles and genuine enthusiasm with this group.

10 years of SAP HR learning

To introduce Day 1’s keynote speakers, Rizal Ahmed – Executive Vice President at Wellesley Information Services, the producer of the SAPinsider conference – took the stage and jokingly asked the crowd if they wanted to sing “Happy Birthday” to the HR2013 conference, as this marks the HR event’s 10^th year. Ahmed also made a point to acknowledge SAP mentor and tweeter extraordinaire Martin Gillet @mgillet who -- true to form - was busy tweeting away already.

Ahmed also announced that for the first time, this year the event would borrow from the dating world and offer “Speed Networking.” I had the chance this morning to see this in action, and the turnout was great considering that it was at 7:30 in the morning … in VEGAS! What a group of troopers.

Data points and trends for HR in a global economy: Social, cloud, mobility and analytics

From there, Debra D’Agostino, Editorial Director for Oxford Economics, took the keynote stage to discuss  important trends around HR talent and diversity based on their findings from a 2012 online report surveying  250 HR directors, vice presidents, and C-level folks.

Some of the findings include:

• 67% of respondents claim that the head of HR reports directly to the CEO (evidence that HR is getting a stronger voice at the table).
• 84% of respondents expect analytics usage in HR operations will significantly increase over the next three years. (Important to SAP users, for sure).
• More than 80% of executives say that their HR department is open to adopting new technology.
• 77% say that the need to measure and track employee intake will increase over the next three years.
• 70% expect to have the proper analytics tools in place to accomplish this within three years.

D’Agostino also mentioned several times that the emerging markets tend to continually be ahead of the learning and adoption curve for HR analytics and technology. For example, she cited a study finding that the expected spend in the US for mobility is lower than four other regions.

D’Agostino acknowledged that in response to globalization, mobility is a hot topic and one that brings with it various levels of concern, challenges, and adoption rates. She cited time entry and leave requests as two of the top HR processes that are widely available on mobile devices – and that the rest of the processes behind the curve need to catch up.

She revealed some interesting challenges and anxieties: Currently, 35% of respondents were using cloud solutions in HR. But more than half of the HR executives surveyed admitted they were nervous about the security implications for both mobile and cloud technology and a third cited concern about the use of deeper analytics.

Also of note, the survey clearly found that brand representation on social media is a big concern and challenge for HR executives.

SAP’s HR Roadmap: Cloud? Hybrid? What about On-Prem?

David Ludlow, Group Vice President, Line of Business Solutions, HR, for SAP then took the stage to describe SAP’s latest offerings in response to the current HR market demands. His initial focus was solely on hybrid (on-premise and cloud) offerings as well as cloud-only HR offerings – resulting in much Twitter chatter questioning if the omission of on-premise solutions was intentional or not.

The general tone seemed one of encouraging folks to move to cloud, with SAP and SuccessFactors ready to help customers on their journey to the cloud. When discussing SAP’s approach to helping businesses integrate cloud solutions to their existing environments, he said that it’s not only about software but also about installation guidance, which is where SAP and SuccessFactors can bring additional value.

Ludlow also shared some insights into SAP’s plan for HR, talking of a “loosely coupled suite” that would integrate with the core SAP ERP version 6.0 or above.  These “go forward” solutions, as SAP is calling them, will be the focus of SAP’s investment in the future.  The R&D emphasis, Ludlow said, will concentrate on Talent Management, reminding the audience of the reasons for the SuccessFactors acquisition in the first place. He quoted an estimate that 60% of all talent management is currently being delivered in the cloud, and that number is expected to continue to increase.

Ludlow also reminded attendees that maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 will be good through 2020, and no successor release is defined as of yet.

Demos: Employee Central and Portal for on-premise HR

A demo of recent advances to Employee Central, the core HR system of record in the cloud, highlighted the ability to look up team members, change job or compensation information, and instantly create a historical record in the cloud. Ludlow then got around to talking about SAP ERP HCM on-premise solutions, now supported in 52 countries.

Ludlow revealed that SAP is continuing to invest in this solution with a focus on improving the user experience. Another demo of the HCM Portal followed where attendees saw new capabilities including the ability to now do a random search for an employee name, access a quick card from which they can drill down directly into employee info, and view a short profile that displays a summary of all employee info that is editable.

Ludlow quickly concluded his presentation by touching on how SAP HANA will soon improve HR analytics by allowing users to run payroll reports without having to do it in a reporting warehouse. Before he ended the address, he encouraged folks to stop by the Nakisa booth to see a demo from Nakisa on its enhancement to organizational modeling, which gets rid of some manual entry that previously slowed the process.

 What’s different at HR 2013?

It feels like this year the vibe is special. Maybe it’s because of the special emphasis on networking, with speed networking and panel discussions. Maybe it’s the dynamic discussions driven by the SuccessFactors acquisition. Or  maybe it’s simply because this year, for the first time, the HR event is on its own and not co-located with SAPinsider’s GRC and Financials conferences, as it has been in the past.  

In any case, these HR attendees I’ve talked to are psyched. They’re networking. And they seem to be enjoying the learning!

10. Vodafone Goes Mobile with One of the World's Biggest SAP ERP Rollouts

The Vodafone name alone is noteworthy as the world’s second largest mobile service provider – surpassed only by China Mobile. The company has been in business for over 25 years and today serves over 400 million people worldwide – actually over 500 million people if you include the Verizon Wireless subscribers, a business of which Vodafone owns 45%. The mobile statistics are staggering. It’s undeniable that the world is going mobile – people feel lost without their cell phones constantly at their sides -- and businesses are becoming just as dependent on mobile technology. So I was not surprised when Niall O’Sullivan, Global Finance Transformation Director at Vodafone shared that the business plans, in the short term, to deliver 80% of its internal transactions on mobile devices – being that the company is in the mobile business. But what did surprise me was how seamless Vodafone’s global SAP rollout was, considering it was one of the world’s largest SAP ERP implementations to date.

9: Nu Skin Fights Aging Systems with New HR Software

With so many people talking about the SAP acquisition of SuccessFactors this year, I was happy to see HR in the spotlight as such a hot topic. Even though human resources are at the heart and soul of every company, I find that HR IT projects often don’t get the attention they deserve. I was thrilled to be able to work with health and beauty products maker Nu Skin on a magazine profile. Nu Skin’s story represented a fairly common situation – a company with no centralized HR system to collect employee data or provide standardized HR reporting – and so the business elected to implement SAP ERP HCM. During the interview, I was struck by how NuSkin genuinely put its people first, because its people include more than 800,000 independent distributors. Lots of companies say they are people-centric but don’t follow through when you look below the surface. NuSkin’s project involved personal attention every step of the way, and is a great model for others to follow.

8: Fast, Detailed, Actionable Analytics at Graybar

Every company needs to focus first and foremost on getting new customers and retaining existing ones. However, it’s easy to see how salespeople naturally gravitate to paying the most attention to the customers that are spending the most money. Graybar’s story tells of a business that changed the way it managed its customers by providing sales with detailed, actionable customer analytics leveraging the processing power of SAP HANA. While the concept of customer stratification was a new one to me, after hearing from John Mansfield, Vice President of Business Development, I was sold on the idea and wondered how my own company could benefit from adopting a customer strategy like this.

7: Kraft Foods' Recipe for Successful Business Intelligence

The folks on the Business Intelligence team at Kraft Foods were such a pleasure to work with. They candidly discussed their experiences with adopting SAP BusinessObjects solutions, including the pitfalls, and were kind enough to share their four-point plan for speeding BI deployments. And speed was the main takeaway I got from their story. They sped up their report creation process enormously, where some reports that used to take weeks to create now only take minutes. And 500 million rows of data now render in less than three seconds. It’s amazing to think of what this means for business users and decision makers at Kraft. Not only the time saved but the faster analytics that can result, such as identifying and responding to trends like never before. That way they will know to keep up with product demands so they can ensure my favorite Kraft food -- Velveeta Shells and Cheese – is always stocked and ready for me at the local Ralphs market.

6: Mr. Potato Head Meets New Markets at Hasbro

Hasbro isn’t just all fun and games – there’s a serious side to the business and that was evidenced by the Way to Work initiative that Hasbro’s executives described in this profile. This initiative involved an IT-supported business transformation to standardize systems and processes on SAP software, ensuring that as the business expands into emerging markets those local businesses can be brought up onto the core systems quickly. In addition to this article, there’s a fantastic video that CIO Denise Clark and Dan Ratigan, VP of Global IT, participated in available for streaming, in which they provide some additional insights.

5: NVIDIA Saves Millions Through Improved Forecasting Accuracy

NVIDIA is really a giant in the electronics and computer chip-making industry – along with competitors like AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm. To stay competitive in this field, it’s imperative to forecast customer demand and consequently inventory levels accurately. If demand dips, NVIDIA could lose millions of dollars from excess inventory. Deploying a new forecasting solution (SAP APO) and SAP BusinessObjects solutions brought about amazing changes to the supply chain. In addition to being able to visualize and plan chip production a year in advance, the business was able to reduce forecast inaccuracy by 2%. This reduction might not seem like a significant amount at first glance, but putting into perspective that this percentage translates to saving millions of dollars of potential inventory write-offs, it’s a pretty jaw-dropping result.

4: Early Adopter Surgutneftegas Takes SAP HANA for a Test Drive

SAP HANA was front and center at both of SAP’s events this year, SAPPHIRE and TechEd. Customers want to know what it is, how it works, and what it means for their businesses. Because the technology is still new to many users, and companies are just starting pilot projects with the software, it was not easy finding early adopters that were willing to speak about their experiences. I was overjoyed when Surgutneftegas’ CIO Rinat Gimranov agreed to share his story with insiderPROFILES readers. In the interview, Gimranov shared the real-time analytics and reporting advantages he sees with SAP HANA, even though the functionality is not yet in production for commercial operation. Anyone considering a HANA implementation or just wanting to know more about the technology should not miss this article.

3: New Balance Picks up the Pace and Closes Financial Books Twice as Fast

Not every customer that implements an SAP application is necessarily running SAP software for its back-end systems. New Balance is a great example of a company that continues to run non-SAP legacy systems, but has implemented an SAP application – SAP Business Planning and Consolidation in this case – for a specific business purpose. When support for its financial consolidation system was ending, New Balance selected the SAP application to replace the existing solution. This new application ultimately helped the company cut its average financial close time in half. In addition to dramatically streamlining the closing process, the business improved visibility to let the finance team focus on more strategic functions. And clearly, the less time people are bogged down running reports, the more time they have to analyze the data in those reports.

2: How McCormick Cut Its Database Size in Half with No Negative Effects

All companies, whether big or small, need to think about data storage. They need to question how long it is necessary to hold on to data, what the process is for data retrieval, and what back-up plans are in place. With a rapidly growing database at McCormick, the IT team became concerned about the time required to back up the company’s database — in some cases, it took as long as 24 hours. The team identified data compression of its IBM DB2 database as the solution and was able to reduce its database size by 50% without affecting performance. Previously, backup was taking 24 hours, and after compression, the process was cut to about 10 hours. For those thinking of ways to cut back on database size, the lessons learned from McCormick’s experience will be invaluable.

1: Standard Bank Shows How Mobile Devices Can Help Reduce Poverty in Africa

Living in a major city with an ATM a block away from my house, it’s hard to imagine what life would be like living in a remote area of Africa with no access to a bank branch, or better yet a computer terminal to do online banking. But that’s the reality for a large amount of the world’s population. And without easy access to banking services, people can have a hard a hard time doing simple tasks that I take for granted such as applying for credit cards, managing savings, or paying bills. Standard Bank saw an opportunity to leverage SAP and Sybase technology to originate new accounts by offering a way for people to easily open bank accounts and access banking services with their mobile phones. Not only did this story pull on my heartstrings but it also showed how SAP technology is not just helping businesses run faster, better, and stronger, but could actually help improve economic conditions in nations in ways I never could have imagined.

At the SAP TechEd keynote at the Venetian Hotel this morning in Las Vegas, SAP HANA certainly stole the show. Keynote speaker and SAP executive board member Vishal Sikka, who was introduced as "the Godfather of SAP HANA," said he was a bit uncomfortable with that kind of introduction, seeing as it came at an Italian-themed Vegas casino.

He started his speech with some heartfelt and personal commentary about the injustice of being up so early in Sin City -- and shared his feelings about watching the beautiful sunrise as he was readying for this morning's events. Vishal equated the view to a fog lifting in the enterprise world today.

And he spoke a lot about how SAP and "we" collectively are limited only by our imaginations.

Of course, Vishal considers SAP HANA his little girl ("I have two boys and a little girl now," he joked.) And he dedicated much of the keynote to speaking about his little girl and the recent wins since the unveiling of SAP HANA 18 months ago. Here are a few of the facts and figures I found most interesting:

• There are 603 SAP customers now running HANA.
• 18 of them are in the 10,000 club, which means they have experienced a factor of 10,000 improvement in productivity since using the appliance.
• Since developing the 100TB in-memory system with IBM, he says the price has already dropped 20-25%.
• And at the upcoming TechEd in Madrid, he says SAP will be up and running with a demo of SAP HANA running 10 years of data -- a company that executes 330 million transactions each day -- at a compressed rate that demonstrates a reduction of 20 times.

Vishal showed a lot of graphs and slides that showed end users lose attention after 9-10 seconds of inactivity. And HANA is the platform at the heart of preventing this through real-time, in-memory computing and analytics. He spoke about empowering end users, removing complexity, and designing a non-disruptive, continuous user experience on a platform that allows for renewal and evolution.One graph showed HANA processing 2 billion scans per second per core.

Vishal also emphasized that HANA is not just an analytical database but also offers breakthrough transactional performance. It also processes 1 million inserts per second. And this figure was actually updated to 1.5 million inserts later on in the keynote. How's that for real-time information?

There were other announcements and people called on stage during his keynote. But what received the loudest applause was the news that SAP HANA is now available as an Amazon web service for about 99 cents per hour. It can be up and running in 3-7 minutes; however, the disclaimer was thrown out there that it is only for small amounts of data -- for startups or people just wanting to try it out with limited amounts of data.

Another well-received tidbit was the announcement that NetWeaver Cloud, the brand new open source development platform for Java programmers, is generally available now -- and there are unlimited NetWeaver development licenses out now (insert loud applause here).

Some new mobile apps got a quick callout, including Recalls Plus, a new fashion app, and one called PhotoTrip, which involves a way to share pictures with a private community based on pics from an event.

And the newest mobile app that SAP recently signed a deal for is a professional sports app for fans of the NFL or the NBA. This is nothing groundbreaking in the sports world, but for SAP, this is definitely a cool new area to enter into. Users can see schedules and rosters for their home teams and even integrating to third parties, such as ticketing brokers or things like PhotoTrip, where sports attendees can share pics with community members live from the game. Having just been in Seattle watching Tom Brady and the rest of the Patriots lose to the Seahawks (sadly), I would've loved to have been able to use the SportsApp to share my dejected comments and pics.

Attendees seemed enthusiastic also about the news that all BOBJ dashboards now can be run on the iPad -- and at the prospect of receiving a "I was a data geek before it was cool" t-shirt by taking part in the Data Geek Challenge. The DemoJam is tonight at 8pm -- cutely referred to as the American Idol for Geeks. Looking forward to what tonight has in store!